The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Intelligence analysts and other computer users often interact with computer-based databases. When these users work with a large database containing information on millions of individuals, many individuals represented in the database may possess the same name, which can make it a challenge to determine what information refers to each unique real-world individual. Moreover, factors such as misspellings, alternate spellings, and missing information can cause further complications. The same issues are encountered when new data is imported into the database from external data sources. For databases that operate with terabytes of data, these problems are acute. Users and researchers in the database field desire to have systems that can ensure that there is only one database entry for each real person, such that one record relates to one unique entity in the database.